Dive Brief:
- Administrators considering social-emotional programs can benefit from schools that have made the shift already, following four steps to implement successful, school-wide programs.
- District Administration reports SEL needs to come with a change in climate and culture, embraced by all staff and administrators and implemented with a focus on positive thinking and the growth mindset — and teachers must then take that perspective and turn it into direct instruction for students, who can learn about their physical reactions to stress and concrete techniques to address them.
- From there, teachers should integrate SEL into their lesson plans through projects requiring persistence, resilience and grit. Once those systems are in place, figuring out how to measure what parts of the strategy are working, via assessments or other techniques, creates a feedback loop for improvement.
Dive Insight:
In some cases, asking students to focus explicitly on social-emotional skill-building and reflection is important. But perhaps more often, schools have found success sneaking in this type of instruction with other activities. At Katherine Smith Elementary School in San Jose, CA, a focus on project-based learning gives students opportunities to develop grit, collaboration skills, goal-setting and perseverance. Teachers don’t take time out of their lessons to teach this — their lessons foster the skills implicitly.
In Chicago Public Schools, a study about the impact of mindfulness techniques asks the control group of students and teachers to pause instruction throughout the day for short mindfulness exercises. Anecdotally, teachers say this has created more time for focused instruction because students use the exercises to get on task more quickly. In both cases, students are honing nonacademic skills that will surely help them in college and career.